


ginny weasley: a eulogy

by endoftheline7



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, Femslash, Grief/Mourning, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Hogwarts Era, Non-Linear Narrative, Pining, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 18:24:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15176642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endoftheline7/pseuds/endoftheline7
Summary: Ginny learned how to blaze. Tom stole her voice and her mind and once liberated, she thoughtnever again. She spoke when she wanted. She laughed hard and loud at the things she thought were funny.





	ginny weasley: a eulogy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linnylove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linnylove/gifts).



_harry_

Harry laughed when she told him, sat side by side before the Burrow, watching the sun sink slowly beyond the horizon. The sky was streaked with yellow and orange and red, high flames, Fiendfyre. Ginny imagined she could see it reflected in Harry's eyes. He was so, so beautiful. His hair was black as night and it complimented the deep bronze of his skin; the scar was pure electric on his forehead, his eyes were warm and kind and green. He looked glorious in the sunset, like something from a fairytale, a great God watching the sun set on his kingdom. Gryffindor embodied. A hero for the ages. Affection for him was a well inside of her, growing and overflowing and stronger than it had ever been. But it was different now. They were different.

“It isn't funny,” she said, but she wasn't angry.

“It is,” he said, “it's fucking priceless.” He paused, looking to the kaleidoscope sky, and she admired the smile on his face. She loved when he laughed. He deserved it, after everything. “Of course you are,” he added. “I should've known.”

“So should _I_ ,” she argued, and another shocked laugh escaped him, before he gazed at her with so much love in his eyes.

“I'm gay too,” he confessed, grin fit to bursting, and suddenly Ginny saw the funny side. Of _course_. Both of them.

She started to laugh, slow at first. It grew, loud and wild and untamed, and once she'd started she couldn't stop, her ribs shaking at the ridiculous hilarity of it all. She felt as though she hadn't laughed in an age. Her First Laugh Since. She felt as though this was deserving of it – what a pair they were, laughing like fools, barefoot in the damp grass, falling all over one another. Their relationship had been years in the making, and given the insularity of wizarding society, it hadn't been unlikely that they'd marry someday.

But now, here it was, the great and ugly truth: they were both gay.

The first time she'd felt her stomach swoop when Katie Bell had smiled at her over lunch she'd felt so ugly. She'd been young and scared and, mere minutes before, she'd been certain that Harry was what she wanted. She'd shoved it down. She'd let Michael Corner hold her hand and kiss her cheek. She'd let Dean Thomas kiss her full on the mouth, push his tongue against hers. He was beautiful. Not unlike Harry, really, but it had felt wrong. Like she was playing a role in a story that never seemed to end.

Harry had kissed her and it hadn't been so bad. She told herself she was supposed to want him like this, she was supposed to love him. And she'd thought she had, _really_ , she'd adored him. It had been different than with Dean. Harry hadn't been around all that much because he had a whole world to save and Ginny had thought that was it. All she'd wanted for what felt like forever. It had been pretty fucking great.

They'd never really touched. She'd never really touched any of them. She'd been young and untried with Michael and had shied from anything further than a bit of lacklustre snogging with Dean. And Harry had never been around. When he was, he'd never seemed to want it. She'd wondered back then if that was why she liked him so much – he wasn't like other boys, all sex-crazed and leering. He was so soft and so kind and so unbelievably and breathtakingly brave that it hurt to look at him. Like looking at the sun.

Sex must've seemed petty to him, she'd thought. He had to save the world. Sixteen with the world on his shoulders. Seventeen and he'd been willing to die. For them, for all of them.

Harry wanted boys. Harry had never truly wanted her and vice versa. Perhaps they really were a perfect match. But it was yet another reminder: Harry wasn't ugly, and neither was she.

She'd felt ugliness right to her bones when she'd first started looking at girls. But now, gay as ever, laughing with the only boy besides her brothers that she'd ever loved, she couldn't imagine a prettier sight. Her First Laugh Since, her reunion with all the beauties of the world.

 

 

_luna_

The war darkened everything. The world was dull and grey and life was hardly worth living. But Luna. Luna. She was a light in the darkness, a hope amidst all the sorrow. She lived up to her name. A sliver of bright moon in a sky of midnight.

Ginny hadn't always loved her. Luna's odd comments and dreamy disposition that Ginny had glimpsed in their shared Transfiguration classes had distanced them. Loony Lovegood. In that first year, Ginny had been too wrapped up in Gryffindor to care. After Tom, after the diary, after the Chamber, she'd been newly grounded in the real, and Luna's eccentricities and Ginny's increasing popularity had only appeared to seal their fate of mere classmates, barely acquaintances.

But the war churned on, brewing in the beyond. Ginny learned to let go. To live a little. She wasn't Harry, destiny secured from birth to death. She wasn't Ron or Hermione, pledged to stand by his side from the first day they met. She stopped caring so much about what people thought. If there was to be a war, if they were to die, none of it mattered anyway. So she let Dean snog her for the hell of it and she stopped silently belittling Luna's whimsical words, starting listening.

Their friendship was simple and true. They fit together almost immediately, light and dark, Lumos and Nox. If Ginny was day then Luna was night; she was the moon to Ginny's sun. The air to Ginny's fire. Fire needed air to burn, and Merlin, Ginny didn't half burn when Luna looked at her. But a war was building, back then. Everyone was burning.

Luna just smiled when the war came up in conversation, and looked away.

She wasn't mad at all. She was beautiful. She made sense in an odd, hard-to-follow sort of way.

The first time Ginny felt her head spin when Luna smiled at her was back in fifth year, after Quidditch practice. She was still with Dean. The air was cool and early spring lent a fresh, crisp feeling to it. Luna was on an evening walk, feet bare and grubby as she strolled through the long, thick grass, humming absent-mindedly as Ginny approached her in the dim twilight.

“Evening, Ginny,” she said, skirt flowing about her in the quiet breeze, strands of hair curled about her head, escaping her untidy up-do. “Would you like to join me?” she asked, eyes bright and guileless, mouth curled pleasantly. Ginny was exhausted and frustrated but all of it had dissolved in seconds. Her stomach lurched. Her heart clenched. Her head swam. The world as she knew it tilted.

Because it was one thing being infatuated with your brother's best friend. It was another thing entirely to begin falling desperately for your own.

Ginny swallowed it. She was her mother's only daughter and she was supposed to marry the saviour of the wizarding world. She still laughed at the extravagant tales Luna span but pretended they didn't fill her with a fierce fondness. She still sat beside her in the library, a little too close, helping her with homework, but pretended she wasn't enchanted by the flowery smell of her hair or the warm hum of her proximity. She still linked fingers with Luna when yet another jeer was thrown her way, poking at her jewellery or the silly colours she wore or her unavoidable lack of footwear, but pretended the minimal contact didn't send thrills down her spine.

Ginny began jeering back. Pathetic pre-teen boys and insecure little girls didn't mean a thing, they didn't realise the gravity of the war, not quite yet. They could all do with some colour in their lives, and a little frivolity never hurt anyone. They stopped with the insults, after a while. At least when Ginny was around. Which was a lot.

“I don't mind you know,” Luna murmured one day, flicking through the Quibbler as they sat by the Lake, drawing Ginny's drifting attention to her. Ginny had been admiring their unexpected companionship and wondering what they must look like to an outsider. One girl with a shock of red hair and one with dirty blonde. One girl choking around a great and terrible secret and one without a care in the world. She wondered if their roles seemed reversed. To the rest of the world, Ginny was brilliant and carefree; Luna was mysterious and impenetrable. The rest of the world didn't know shit.

“Don't mind what?”

“What they say about me.” Luna looked up at Ginny and saw her jaw clench, rage swelling within her at the mere memory. “That I'm weird. That I dress wrong. They're right: I am weird. I like dressing wrong.”

“I mind,” rushed from Ginny's mouth, unbidden. “I know they're idiots, and I know it doesn't matter what they think, what _anybody_ thinks, but I don't like people talking about my friends that way.”

Luna smiled, a near-involuntary reflex as her cheeks pinked, and looked away. “Friends,” she said, mostly to herself. Testing it in her mouth. Confirming it.

“And you don't dress wrong,” Ginny continued. Just like Her First Laugh Since, once she'd started, she couldn't stop. “You dress like you,” she said, “and you definitely aren't wrong. One day they'll grow up and realise cork necklaces are a lot more fun than getting caught up in what other people look like. One day they'll realise that you had it figured out all along.”

Ginny liked denims and baggy t-shirts. Luna liked bright colours and over-large, unmatched accessories.

People were dying. Clothes didn't matter.

People died, and Hogwarts sunk into misery. Ginny spent many dark nights spent creeping about the Castle she no longer wanted to call home, righteousness hot in her hands as she and the rest of Dumbledore's Army pasted their slogans on the walls. Times were dark, yes, but that hot sense of justice and whispered camaraderie of their union often made her want to cry with it all. They weren't at the forefront of the fight like Harry, but Ginny would swear blind that they had just as much impact: hope was a powerful thing, in war. Hope helped them win.

Hers was stolen from her when Luna hadn't returned in January. Ginny worried herself sick, now finally apart from Harry beginning to realise what that rollercoaster rush of emotions she felt gazing into Luna's eyes meant. She cried and Neville held her, she worried Luna was dead and sought his comfort, which he gave willingly, automatically, false reassurances falling like honey from his tongue, his worry stored in his watery eyes. Ginny's dormitory had diminished in inhabitants and nobody missed her when she crept to the boys' room, empty but for Seamus and Neville. She slept in Harry's bed. The sheets were soft and clean and held no remnant of him. It was little consolation.

It was the magic of the Room of Requirement that brought back that spark. The magic of the castle, alight in its very walls. Hogwarts didn't discriminate: muggleborn or pureblood, magic was magic. And it knew them. It knew their magic. Ginny felt as though she could sense it – they had trained here, all of them. She imagined some nights, in the dark, alone and longing for the extraordinarily ordinary days of her youth at Hogwarts ( _youth_ , like that wasn't still occurring), that she could feel the echoes of Luna's patronus in the air.

Ginny could've done with a patronus, then.

Eventually, it ended. Luna returned to her. And when the Battle was done, Ginny held her in her arms and shook and cried, loud and unashamed in the middle of the Great Hall. Nobody paid her much mind. Her cries simply added to those already in the room.

“I thought you were gone,” Ginny sobbed.

“I'm here,” Luna whispered, and held her back tighter than Ginny ever imagined she could.

Ginny only saw her once Since. They met and spent a day in Ottery St Catchpole, the summer sun surprisingly warm for England. Luna's hair shone but she looked withered and tired. There were dark circles under her eyes and she'd not yet put back on the weight she lost in Malfoy Manor. On that rapidly heating August day, Their First Meeting Since, they walked down the cobblestone streets and window-shopped until their feet were numb. Numbness was good, Ginny decided. It was better than pain. It was one more step toward Her First Laugh Since.

“Your hair is so orange in the sun,” Luna remarked, winding strands of it around her pale, bony fingers and considering them. Ginny almost wept at the normalcy of her, the simple observations, the silly, unimportant ones.

“Yours is more yellow than usual.”

Luna smiled and asked if they could get ice cream. Ginny suddenly wanted her more than ever. She wanted to kiss her in the street, yellow hair and orange hair and ice cream and all. She wanted to hold her close and cry and scream and _rage_ at the sheer agony and loss of everything, of Fred, of Since. The Burrow was filled with reminders of him, thick in the air. She could barely look at George, some days, and had once wondered how he could even bear to look in the mirror before realising the cruelty of her absent thoughts. She'd cried in the bathroom for an extra ten minutes, that evening. Longer than the usual fifteen she permitted herself.

“Did Fred like ice cream?” Luna asked as they finished off their cones on their way back home. Ginny froze, slowly meeting Luna's imploring stare. She was struck with the sudden and absurd urge to slap her. How dare she. How dare she mention his name. How could she think Ginny would want to talk about

(here, Ginny stopped thinking so hard)

“Yes,” she admitted stiffly, “he loved ice cream.”

“You're a lot like him, you know,” Luna replied. “I'm sure he'd be proud of who you've become.”

“Luna,” Ginny warned.

“You have his fire.”

Ginny cried, then. Just gave in to it all, and felt herself stripped raw before Luna like she'd never been before. Luna was surprisingly adept, catching her as she fell, fell _with_ her, cradling her as she rocked like a girl in her arms, like the girl she had once been, sweet and trusting and seeing the stars in her brothers' eyes. Luna let her cry until she had nothing left to give, let her try to form Fred's name, syllables unintelligible amidst her sorrow.

She hated crying. She had never been much of a crier, Before.

But it felt like all anybody had been doing lately was crying. George was devastated beyond her understanding and her parents were almost as inconsolable. Bill walked around the house like an animated ghost, Charlie barely said a word. Percy had taken to traipsing across the fields and was scarcely seen in the house anymore. Ron was more inclined to her approach: swallow it, block it out, keep your grief private. But it was difficult. Fred was everywhere. He even caught in Harry and Hermione's throats, sometimes, their ageing, quiet mourning dredged up by a particularly _him_ comment, or a discarded Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes product. Fred lived in the cracks and corners of the Burrow, in the family clock, in the unkempt garden, the creaking stairs he used to run about on, much to their mother's dismay. He lived in the summer heat and the sky; Ginny hadn't touched a broom Since. He lived in her hair and her laugh and her heart and she couldn't stand it.

Like all things, the tears subsided. The tide shrinking back into the sea.

“I'm sorry,” she eventually said, wiping her eyes clear of any lasting, wayward tears. They didn't talk about Fred, at home. He went unmentioned, unheard. “You must think I'm so pathetic.”

“I don't think that.”

“I just feel so – so...” She trailed off, frustrated. “I feel so helpless. I'm sorry. I'm not usually this weak.”

“Don't be sorry, Ginny,” Luna replied, sing-song voice dragging the conversation away from its original sorrow. “Sometimes you have to be strong to be weak.”

It was the most Luna thing to say. Ginny mused how she managed to make the most profound things sound so meaningless and transient, but she got the spirit, saw it honest and true in Luna's face. Her eyes were open and silver. A silver storm.

She was right – there was strength in admitting weakness. Ginny was braver for allowing herself such justified misery. Her brother had been ripped from her life, she had lost friends and allies, her second home had been torn apart. Ginny didn't want to leave Luna in the long grass, she didn't want to go home. But she did.

The summer trudged by; Ginny waited for September. She felt like she was drowning in loss without anyone to hold her up.

 

 

_neville_

“I was wondering if...”

It was Neville's fourth failed attempt to finish his question, after approaching her in a distant corner of the library and flushing and fumbling over his words. They'd had very little interactions before today, and only a thin connection through Ron, and by extension, Harry. Understandably, Ginny was confused, her slowly developing Potions essay only furthering her bewilderment.

“I don't have a date to the Yule Ball,” he finally finished on helplessly, looking at her imploringly before his gaze skittered away. “Would you – I mean – friends?” And Ginny finally understood. He was shy and reserved, a contrast to Ginny's newly increasing outspoken tendencies and popularity, but she was both charmed by it and far too excited to turn down an offer to a Ball not otherwise available to her.

When Christmas Eve came, he quietly told her she looked nice in her lime dress and his hands were sweaty as he led her into the Hall. They danced only a few dances before Michael Corner whisked her off later in the night. He sneaked her sips of Elderflower Wine and spiked punch and Ginny got drunk for the first time at thirteen at a Ball she didn't spend dancing with her partner. The alcohol helped drown out the sight of Harry staring at Cho, spinning around with Cedric. In an oddly charged moment that was only a hazy memory in the later years, she caught eyes with Malfoy, their stares drifting from Harry and converging. If she was sober at the time she perhaps would've pondered on it more.

But she wasn't. She was far too busy being twirled around by a boy she barely knew and was willing herself desperately to like.

“Sorry about last night,” she said the following day, finding Neville in the greenhouse after dinner. “I hope you don't feel as though I abandoned you.”

“Not at all,” he reassured her. In the years to come, his reassurances would be dear to her, would help wash away the awful sights of Luna in pain from her mind. Without Luna by her side, bringing light to the dark, bringing a whimsy to the severe, Ginny was lost. She had to make do with Neville – he was the calm one, the steady one, the one to dry their tears. He had a quiet bravery to him ( _i'll join you when hell freezes over,_ spoken proud and brave and reckless to Voldemort himself). “I hope you had fun.”

Friends. The title stuck, accompanying them as the world grew darker, strengthening as the war progressed. He was kind and lacking in confidence and it made him sweeter than most when it came to Luna. The two were surprisingly complementary, with Luna's endless curiosity and dreamy disposition making her at home amongst the plants he was fascinated so greatly by, and Neville's silent observant nature a credit to listening to Luna's fantastical private world. Ginny was grateful for them both, her _friends;_ she loved them more powerfully than she could ever have imagined she could love anybody outside of her family.

Or what was left of them.

“How's Hannah?” Ginny asked archly on the Hogwarts Express, sat opposite Neville in the carriage, eyes zeroing in on the intermittent red bruising stretching from his neck to beneath his robes. He blushed, attempting to rearrange the collar of his robes subtly.

“She's fine,” he replied, faux-innocence filling his tone, and Ginny was nearly coaxed into Her Second Laugh Since. She liked Hannah. She liked that Hannah still wore her hair in pigtails and had an affinity for floral patterns. She liked that Hannah liked Neville.

“It looks like a Crumple-Horned Snorkack's been sucking on Neville's neck,” Luna remarked, and Ginny snorted as Neville sank further into his embarrassment.

Sex came hand in hand with adulthood. It wasn't a necessity, but Ginny had always been popular with boys – would people notice that she shied from them, now? Harry was the only one she'd told. She'd need him in the coming months.

Ginny couldn't be happier that the year above had been offered an eighth year – she had always liked most of them, and it meant she wasn't about to be apart from Neville, Harry, Hermione or Ron for yet another year. They had all sorely missed out on a proper education last year, and Ginny was torn between wanting to relax after everything or throwing herself into her studies. Her and Luna were in the same Transfiguration, Care of Magical Creatures and Charms classes. Luna wasn't taking Defence against the Dark Arts for NEWTs, and Ginny had decided to switch Herbology for Muggle Studies, a subject unavailable under the Carrows.

She'd always coasted by her classes. She'd gotten mostly E's in her OWLs, save for O's in DADA and Charms. She was an average student. An average girl. She wasn't clever like Hermione or different like Luna. She was _pretty_ , maybe, but standing out didn't count if it was only because gross teenage boys wanted to fuck her.

“How was your summer?” Neville asked, voice hesitant.

“Warm,” Luna answered, dreamy.

“Mine too,” Ginny agreed, grinning over at her. Luna was staring out of the train window, watching the countryside rush by in a green blur, hands perched in her lap. Her head was resting against the window. Her nails were painted orange and yellow. Ginny's heart skipped a beat. “Yours?”

Neville smiled. “Lonely,” he admitted.

“There's no need to be lonely anymore, Neville,” Luna said, lifting her head and smiling at him, warm like the summer. “You're with friends now.”

 

 

_hermione_

Ginny was buzzing with excitement as they bedded down that night, Hermione curling in her camp bed and Ginny under her patchwork quilt on the lumpy mattress she had grown so used to. She stared at Hermione in the moonlight (Ginny had always liked the moon), her lithe figure climbing into bed, her nearly-fifteen-year-old body breaching womanhood, widening her hips, filling her chest. Ginny's eyes were drawn to the curves of her thighs in her tiny pyjama shorts. Her skin was cool walnut in the nocturne.

“Are you excited for tomorrow?” Ginny asked, voice a lilt in their shared soft silence.

“I've never been the biggest fan of Quidditch,” Hermione confessed, “I find it hard to follow, if I'm honest. But I'm looking forward to the atmosphere. It's the World Cup – it's inherently thrilling.” Ginny smiled at her formalities even between friends, even in the nighttime. Hermione went on to add, “and Cedric Diggory, I'll admit, is bloody gorgeous. It won't hurt to spend a bit of time with him.”

Ginny had seen him around school. He had the same sort of charisma as Harry: it simply bled from him, but he handled it with care and caution, in a way not many did this early in life. She hadn't noted his looks before now, but muttered a vague assent to Hermione that he was, in fact, brilliantly handsome. Her dreams that night were filled with Cedric's chiselled features and Hermione's soft ones, his hard, built body, Hermione's gently composed one, undeniably feminine even in the dark. Her silhouette against the window had Ginny's stomach dropping in an odd way, her thighs pressing together beneath the covers of her bed.

Ginny was beginning to understand want. She wasn't quite into the swing of puberty yet, with her period arriving only a few months previous, still uneven and unregulated in her growing body. She had touched herself only once, waking up to arousal flaring between her legs, but after glancing at her Gwenog Jones poster and abruptly finishing, she decided to never do it again, naive and thirteen and frightened of herself. She found the occasional pimple appearing on her nose, and was glad to have escaped the wrath of acne unleashed upon many of the teenage population at Hogwarts, worrying about those sorts of things in the way that teenage girls _do_ , poked and prodded and put on a pedestal by unwritten laws that said what she was _supposed_ to do. She was _supposed_ to shut her mouth when it came to matters of the vagina, like periods and masturbation and sex. She was _supposed_ to have clear skin and perfectly pouty lips and a body like Hermione's, even only two weeks into teenagerdom. She was _supposed_ to want Harry. She did, she did want Harry, she did.

It was like a mantra as the years went by. She wanted Harry. She wanted Michael. She wanted Dean. She listened to the girls in her dorm talk about fucking, hard and heavy, and pretended to understand, privately thinking it sounded like an awfully vulgar affair. She listened to Hermione's confessions about Victor Krum's hands hot on her thighs, his hips between hers. She smiled and flirted and relished the attention she received from the opposite sex, ignoring that distant feeling of _wrong_. She didn't consider other options.

“– and Katie's just come out as a lesbian and she's worried they might –”

“Lesbian?” Ginny asked. She hadn't the education Hermione had. She lived in a little house hidden from the world and she'd been taught at home, with no internet and no access to the uncouth muggle children of her age, throwing around words she needed to learn, dramatising the rarities of the world, making synonyms of _different_ and _ugly_.

Hermione saw her expression and didn't condescend. “She likes girls,” she clarified. “With the Ministry falling further into totalitarianism – and yes, I know I'm being dramatic, but Umbridge is definitely a red flag – Katie's worried her sexuality will be an issue of contention. I wouldn't put it past Fudge.”

Ginny had known that there were girls who liked girls and boys who liked boys, she'd known _gay_ and _queer_ and _bent_ , but she hadn't known _lesbian_. She'd known they were called names from time to time, noticing the stares and occasional taunts pointed at those boys in seventh year who held hands and the girls in sixth who kissed in the corridors. She heard the derision aimed at the boy in the year below her who spoke in a high voice and liked to wear mascara, as if femininity was immediately indicative of gayness (hermione's round behind and her round bust and her silhouette in the dark), like it was _wrong_. She hadn't realised it was so systematic, this bigotry.

Lesbian. The word was new and rough and raw; she hadn't heard it before. She worried it like a loose tooth for months on end.

Katie Bell was a lesbian. She smiled at Ginny over lunch the very next week. The world tilted.

War came. Fred died. _Lesbian_ was drowned out in the din.

Hermione wasn't really one for flying but one afternoon Ginny managed to coax her from Ron's side, berating her for her careful consideration of his and Harry's essays. They were spread before the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, resolutely ignoring the excited whispers and overt glances sent their way from the younger students in the room. Ginny could tell it made Harry as uncomfortable as ever, but he was different about it now. More patient. She could tell Colin Creevey haunted his conscience.

“They're adults, 'Mione,” Ginny chastised as they made their way to the Pitch, the Scottish September air a welcome reprieve from the heat of Devon that July and August. Ginny had even considered accompanying Harry to London every other week or so, where he sat in on the arduous trials of Deatheaters. But the venom that had surfaced in her at the thought of it… she'd decided to endure the heat. “You don't need to do their work for them.”

“You're right,” Hermione conceded, “but they've both been so cut up this summer. They were both unsure about eighth year – your brother especially – and we've only been back a few days. I thought a little boost might help. I don't plan to do it all year. I have my own subjects to take, after all.”

They'd all been cut up this summer. Wrapped up in themselves, lost, suffocating.

So Ginny took a moment to breathe in the air of Hogwarts. It wasn't tangled in the grief of Fred like the Burrow had been, and though there was a new solemnity to the Castle that it hadn't previously held (the ghosts ~~(non-corporeal; silent; sad)~~ of the fallen haunted them still), it felt like coming up for air. It felt like when Ginny had finally caught a glimpse of her battered reflection in one of Hogwarts' shattered windowpanes in the aftermath of the Battle, bloody and bruised and bereaving, and thought: _I'm a lesbian_.

Hermione smiled at her and moved to sit in the stands. Ginny gripped her broom so tight her knuckles flushed white, she mounted it and let the breeze take her, sighing against the surge of emotion brought by Her First Fly Since. Fred and George had written her when they'd found out she made the Quidditch team, a paragraph from each of them, George's handwriting tall and sloping, Fred's small and scribbled. They'd signed it _your favourite brothers_ and Ginny had kept it out of sheer sentimentality, had brought it with her to Hogwarts this year and slid it under her mattress, longing to feel Fred alive in the parchment. She had almost memorised his words, had read them over a thousand times and heard his voice in her head, her heart.

 _i've always known you were a someone to watch out for_ , was a line that sent her heart clenching, but not as much as his hastily scrawled and surprisingly affectionate _love you sis. really am proud._

Ginny drifted upwards, absent-minded, Her First Fly Since skipping stones in the pool of her memories, sending ripples, aftershocks, waves of faint grief. The air thickened with it, and she opened herself to the possibility that the Burrow hadn't been the issue. Fred's heart continued to beat in the very air around her, the wind in the trees, the shifting clouds. She almost smiled at the absurd constancy of it. It was like he was still there.

How Loss had changed her. The happy girl the twins had talked about in the letter felt irretrievable.

 

 

_draco ~~(really??)~~_

“Is it true you and Potter are co-captains this year?”

“Threatened?”

“Not playing,” Malfoy answered swiftly, and Ginny blinked through her shock. Malfoy? Giving up an opportunity to taunt Harry? It was unheard of.

The war had changed all of them, irreversibly. Loss had changed all of them.

“Is it because you think people would mind?”

Here, Ginny learned that Malfoy blushed terribly, caught off guard by Luna's perception. She was like that, sometimes. Often, Ginny had imagined she was like a predator preparing to pounce, observing and calculating right until she found the perfect moment to strike. But that suggested malice, implied cruel intent. Luna was practically incapable of it.

“I… I just didn't feel like it,” he denied weakly, cheeks a brilliant pink.

Ginny didn't care for Malfoy, never had. He had grown from a bitter school bully to a vile Deatheater and to something else entirely, now. Harry had told her he'd elected to speak at his trial and Ginny had slapped him, incensed at the mere thought of it. Holding his cheek, barely phased, Harry had explained in a steady voice that he didn't expect her to understand but wanted her to hear it from him. Fred had only been dead a month and Ginny had been disgusted that Harry wanted to defend one of Them. Us and Them. It had been her philosophy.

“Fred would be turning in his grave.”

The remark had stung more than the slap, echoed in their ears. Harry had looked as though he were about to retch. His jaw twitched, frustration etching his face, expression screwing up to stopper his tears.

“The world isn't split into good people and Deatheaters,” Harry had whispered, shaky. “I loved Fred. I did. But I have to do this. I'm sorry. I won't change my mind... he – he was just a boy.”

He'd returned from London two days later and Ginny had forgiven him in an instant, rushing from her room and forcibly embracing him before he even reached the door, that well of affection bubbling over again, unchecked, hot and sore in her chest. They'd stayed up late that night and she'd listened to a fully formed justification. They'd both cried quietly over Fred and Ginny had apologised until she was blue in the face for her actions: she was stubborn like no other, not like Fred. Fred was forgiving. It was why George had been so quick to accept Harry's decision (though another factor may have been his intense focus on the emptiness at his side). She had been cruel to doubt Harry's loyalty to her dead brother, who Harry _had_ loved, in his own way.

“Yes, we're co-captains,” Ginny surrendered hastily, suddenly very interested in escaping the awkwardness Luna had steered the conversation into. She distantly wondered why he seemed so interested if he weren't playing Quidditch.

That particular riddle wasn't solved until well into December. There had been a party, igniting the Hufflepuff common room. Ginny had kissed her first girl there, snogged her in the corner and shagged her in her bed. Drunk but quickly sobering, Ginny was creeping from the eighth year Slytherin Girls' dormitory, where Pansy Parkinson had pressed her mouth against her, made her gasp and arch against her soft sheets, had kissed her between her thighs and then on her mouth, warm and wet and everything Ginny had imagined. Ginny had imagined it was Luna. It had been difficult with Pansy's dark hair cut up to her chin, while Luna's reached down past her waist. It had been difficult with Pansy's red lipstick smeared across Ginny's pale, freckled thighs and her tongue working expertly wherever she put it work. Luna wasn't like that. Luna wouldn't be like that. Luna didn't really wear lipstick and she'd use her tongue with abandon, she'd lose herself in it. Luna was sugar. Pansy was spice.

Malfoy was as drunk as all of them, stretched across one of the sofas, somehow retaining his typical haughtiness, even in the state he was in. He was engaged deeply in a wild rant to Blaise Zabini, who drinking Firewhisky straight from the bottle and appeared to be resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Ginny was struck by the simplicity of it. Slytherins really were people.

She didn't hear a lot of Malfoy's words but she heard enough. He didn't notice her, tiptoeing from the Dungeons with a hand clapped over her mouth.

Malfoy had never been kind to her. She had once thought it was prejudice and petty illusions of superiority, but she understood now it had been a ricochet of his own confusions and desires: he had wanted Harry, _all_ of Harry, his attention and hands and eyes and co- and Ginny decided not to listen to the rest of his drunken lament about her ex-boyfriend. Merlin – how long had he said? A flicker of the Yule Ball danced behind her eyes as she laboured all the way back to Gryffindor Tower.

“Malfoy's in love with you,” she said to Harry, meeting him as he was clambering through the portrait hole. He very nearly fell flat on his face. “I heard him crying to Zabini about how he wanted you to fuck him six ways from Sunday. In the Dungeons.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Having sex with Parkinson.”

“Oh.”

“Hinkypunk,” she said. “Their password.”

“Right.” He was frozen in what she assumed to be either disgust or delight. She moved to climb through the portrait hole. “Thanks,” he said. The latter, then.

Luna was curled on her bed when she reached her dorm, and she lifted her head blearily at Ginny's entrance, smiling when she saw it was her. She looked so delicate where she lay, almost Veela-like, like a pretty portrait from some old artist centuries ago, titled something self-explanatory like _girl lies on bed, bit drunk_. Ginny was delirious with the sight of it – Luna in her bed, wrapped in her sheets, half-asleep and sweet in the dawn. She was so beautiful Ginny felt dizzy with it. How she had ever thought this want was ugly escaped her now, sober at last, nerves alive and jumping and firing.

Perhaps it would be easier to simply want Parkinson. She was fit (a given, considering Ginny had just slept with the girl) beyond belief, and her brooding, bad girl Slytherin energy was enough to make anybody weak at the knees. But Ginny wasn't Harry. She _didn't_ want that. Too easy. Too much, after the war. Ginny wanted Luna.

She spoke in riddles and somehow managed to make sense. She looked at a world so cruel and distinguished in it such loveliness. She wore bright colours and over-large, unmatched accessories, she considered Ginny for a mere second and knew immediately what to say ( _your hair is so orange in the sun_ ), she made wisdom witty, she took Ginny's breath away. She was a fucking enigma and Ginny couldn't be happier to have her in her life – how lucky she had been, to have been born on this earth at the same time as someone like Luna, someone who saw magic in every corner of the world and brightened any spark of darkness she touched. Someone so trusting and honest and loving, so fantastically fantastical.

“Your dormmate with the pink hair said I could take your bed. She's very nice.” Luna, oh Luna, Ginny's head was spinning with it all. “I was quite drunk. I hope that's alright.”

Want. It wasn't nearly enough to encompass it.

“I love you,” Ginny said, and went to her, sitting beside her. Luna didn't even blink. Ginny's heart was hammering: she hadn't even admitted it to herself, before now. It was always _want_ and _desire_ and _wonder_. She silently resented the sleeping figures of her dormmates. “I'd kiss you if we were alone.”

“I think I'd like that,” she replied, smiling.

Ginny didn't know what she'd expected. A nasty rejection? A profound, answering love confession? A discussion on the arbitrary definitions of love? That just wasn't Luna. Ginny laughed, _laughed_ at Luna's ridiculous bluntness, Her Second Laugh Since. She laughed so much she had to muffle it with her hands, and Luna's smile stretched so wide it could've split her face. Ginny lay alongside her properly, taking the sight of one of Luna's rare grins and tucking it away for later, treasuring it. Luna drifted into sleep quickly, but Ginny was too struck by it all to settle. She looked at the contrast of their hair, intertwined on her pillows. Orange and yellow. Fire and sunlight.

 

 

_ron_

“Make a wish,” Ron encouraged. He was only six, but it was a whole year older than her and he was so, so tall and he was her big brother and he knew everything. Her hand fit in his warmer, bigger ones. She'd picked a dandelion, blown it into the wind.

 _I wish Bill and Charlie come home soon_ , she willed, eyes screwed shut tight, free hand clenched into a fist with the effort of it. She hated their terms at Hogwarts. She missed them every second.

“What did you wish for?” Ron asked, and she scoffed at him, freeing her hand from his grip and skipping ahead.

“Can't tell you or it won't come true,” she sang, delighting in his frustration and subsequent chase as she attempted to gain a distance between them, speed increasing until she'd broken into a run, hair aflame behind her, legs carrying her across the fields behind the Burrow. The grass scratched against her legs, her bare feet.

She was fast for her age but Ron was older and faster and he had longer legs. He caught up in a mere minute, arm twisting around her waist and tackling her to the ground. She went with a squeal, laughs erupting from her chest at the action, leaving her breathless and blissful in the late afternoon. She was young and hadn't a worry in the world. Boys and girls and wars were long, long in the distance. Ron was presently her favourite person in the world. It was, however, likely to change by dinner. At that age, your opinions can afford to change like the seasons. They don't shape you. Not yet.

“You're a pest,” Ron said, without bite. “What did you wish for?”

“I wished to be taller and faster than all of _you_ ,” she said, turning and sticking her tongue out at him, capitalising on his momentary surprise, escaping his hold, sprinting away and giggling at his noise of annoyance behind her, loping away from him as quick as she could. It wasn't long before she fell – not an uncommon occurrence – but it happened to be as she reached the Burrow, and she planted onto the gravel of the drive, gasping at the sudden shot of pain in her knees.

It was nothing at all. A simple scrape. Of course, at five, she thought the world was ending. Fred and George laughed their heads off at her, Dad was at work, and Percy and Mum were down in town. Ron, her smallest big brother, had to step up. He sat her on the counter and washed her knees with a wet flannel, picking the stones out. She winced and cried and he shushed her.

“Maybe hold off on the wishes for a little while. They don't seem to be working,” he observed, washing the blood out from the flannel. Ginny watched it swirl down the plug, red like the ketchup they poured on the chips from the van in town. Fred and George liked to smear it round their mouths and pretend they were vampires. It used to frighten her, but not anymore. She was big now.

Mum fussed over her when she came back, and Ginny saw the pride in her eyes as she looked down at Ron. She felt a swell affection for them both. Her worrisome mother and her persevering brother.

Mum marked their heights on the wall each year, and each time, Ginny would cross her fingers and screw her eyes shut and hope she was taller. It was with little effect – she remained shorter and slower than them all. She finally gave it up when Ron went off to Hogwarts, grown now and understanding that not only were her brothers of a natural disposition to shoot up in height, but they were all older. She went to Hogwarts and realised that she was actually quite short. It stung. So, like she was in many things, she told herself she was average. An average height. An average girl.

Ron grew feet above her. One time she dreamed he kept growing and it was like Jack and the Beanstalk, his body elongating at an alarming rate, his head and shoulders emerging above the clouds, his face like a big, brilliant moon with ginger hair – Hermione had to climb him to reach her treasure. Ron laughed so hard juice came out of his nose when she told him.

He wasn't her favourite brother. She didn't have a favourite brother. But she fought with Ron the most. He was absolutely infuriating and unbelievably insensitive and frustratingly intolerant of all of Luna's beliefs. But he was her brother, so (reluctantly, sometimes) she loved him.

And then he left. He and Harry and Hermione, off to save the world. Her breath stuttered for fear for Hermione, her dear friend, her nighttime silhouette. Her heart dropped for fear for Harry, her lovely companion, her wonderful ~~(useless, ineffective, misleading)~~ guide through the woes of want that any teenager grappled with. But her whole body seized for fear for her brother, _Ron_ , the one she'd never really gotten along with (aside from Percy, but that was a moral issue). She hadn't felt such violent love for him since girlhood. Fred and George had been FredandGeorge, a fairly exclusionary title, Percy had been… well, Percy, and Charlie and Bill had been off growing up, the age gap painfully large. They had wanted to be RonandGinny. They'd never achieved it.

In a split second, Ginny regretted it. She could truly lose him. She sobbed for all three of them that night, but mostly for Ron.

In the end, it wasn't Ron she lost.

“On a scale of barely to instrumental, how much of a part did you play in orchestrating this whole Malfoy-Harry nonsense?” he asked, filing into her carriage on the way back to King's Cross, the train taking them back to Christmas at the Burrow. Neville and Luna only blinked at him, unaware of the goings-on.

“What nonsense?”

“I caught them _snogging_ ,” he cried, genuine anguish in his tone, face red and splotchy with mortification,“in the _toilets_! I mean. _Malfoy_? And 'Mione already _knew_!”

“Where do I come into this?”

“Apparently you _said_ something. How much were you involved? I need to know whether a disowning is on the cards this Christmas.”

“I'd be lying if I said I wasn't,” she confessed, and Ron groaned in further distress. “But, I mean – it's mostly them, isn't it? I was just involved a bit. A normal amount. An average amount.”

“I don't think you could do anything average, Gin,” he said, off-handedly. Warmth and fondness flared within her. Average. It was what she had always worried she would be: the youngest of seven, the only girl, the outsider. She had to excel to catch up. Ron sat beside Neville and sighed, long-suffering, dramatic. “I mean, Malfoy? _Really_?”

Ginny still didn't care for him. She thought perhaps she never would. But she cared for Harry, For his happiness. A boy so brave deserved a little joy. He had walked into the Forest and had been ready to die, he'd walked all the way from Dumbledore's office, seventeen, alone, captive in his destiny, confined by his very own blood; his body, his being, weaved with Tom's hate and Lily's love. He hadn't said goodbye to any of them. Ginny supposed it would've been too hard. She supposed they wouldn't have let him go. She'd already lost Fred, that night, and Harry lifeless body, limp in Hagrid's arms, had been yet another blow. She had almost buckled with the weight of her Loss.

“You don't seem surprised it was a boy,” Luna remarked. Ginny's stomach flipped. Boys and boys, girls and girls. It must seem so simple to people like Ron, who had never had to worry about it.

“Well. I know he's had girlfriends but… Harry's never been much of a ladies man,” Ron explained, ears red. “I didn't expect it but, well – I'm not shocked, no.”

“I'm gay too.”

The words fell from her lips with ease. Ron's eyes widened.

“Me too,” Luna elected cheerfully.

All eyes swivelled to Neville. He went pink.

“I'm – with Hannah,” he said, and Ron began to laugh.

He laughed right from his stomach, a full belly laugh, falling back against his seat, form shaking with the strength of his mirth. Ginny knew where the humour came from – her and Harry, both gay. It was _funny_ , funny that they had been so intensely confused about what they'd wanted and had subsequently found one another. A perfect arrangement. Ginny started to laugh with her brother, taken by the amusement of it, feeling it building, like Her First Laugh Since, an uncontrollable wave below the quiet sunset. She decided to stop counting.

 

 

_ginny_

Shut up. Smile. Look pretty.

Ginny was the odd one out, surrounded by testosterone and expectation. They were boys, you see. They could run free across the fields for as long as they liked, could take to the skies with ease, laugh as loud and as long as they wanted. Ginny reached a certain age and Mum told her she couldn't go gallivanting over the countryside any longer. Her brothers told her she couldn't join them for Quidditch. She decided to save her voice, her laugh.

Ginny began taking long midnight walks as far away from the Burrow as she liked, feet muddy, the dirt working its way between her toes, unknown to her mother. She liked the way the night air surrounded her. She liked the way the world looked in the dark.

Ginny broke into the broomshed and taught herself how to fly. She wobbled at first, an alien to flight. She righted herself. Breathed in the freedom of it all and became acquainted with balance, thrilling at this tiny rebellion. Another of her secret worlds.

Ginny learned how to blaze. Tom stole her voice and her mind and once liberated, she thought _never again_ , and said goodbye to any construction of shyness she had maintained. She spoke when she wanted. She laughed hard and loud at the things she thought were funny. No man would ever control her again.

She pushed Michael away. She broke up with Dean. She (albeit reluctantly, at the time) said goodbye to Harry.

Ginny cherished the women in her life. Her mother, proud and protective, her short stature making her no less imposing. She watched how Molly managed to quieten her boys with a simple look, the raise of her eyebrows. She marvelled at her mother's endless capacity for love, the way it swelled and swelled and encompassed Harry and Hermione, embracing them without a second thought. And Hermione, her closest thing to a sister. Ginny loved her. Loved how her hair flew wild about her face and loved, while it existed, the jut of her front teeth. She loved how Hermione was _too_ smart, _too_ opinionated, not pretty _enough_. Ron loved her all the same for it and so did Ginny.

Luna. She didn't even wear shoes. She was as far from perfect as you could get.

Bill would be tolerant of her, though a little confused, Charlie would find her funny, Percy would wrinkle his nose. George and Ron were fond, as far as she knew. Fred had been. Would Luna be able to tell them all apart? How Ginny resented her resemblance to her brothers. They were like a mass, a crowd. She was just another freckled ginger, lost in a sea of orange.

Luna arrived in a blaze of yellow. Luna knew, better than anyone, how to be different.

After the war, Ginny looked in the mirror and saw herself, Fred shadowed under her eyes. She saw nobody but herself. Her distinct pattern of freckles, the hue of her skin, the red of her hair. Her deep brown eyes were haunted and vacant. There were bruises on her ribs, from the Battle, bruises on her wrists. Like fading tattoos. She had never filled out quite as much as Hermione, her hips and waist thin and boyish like she was still thirteen, her breasts simple protrusions dotted with freckles, sitting before her heart. They had done a poor job of cushioning its break.

After the war, Ginny looked at Luna's ceiling and saw herself, Fred alive in her smile. She saw nobody but herself. Her eyes were light and joyous, her hair fanned about her head like flames, glorious. This was her Before. The her Since was another beast entirely, a girl stuck in a mirror with nobody but Loss for company.

“It's beautiful, Luna,” she said. “It's a shame I'm not like that anymore.”

“You are,” Luna said. She placed her hand over Ginny's heart, the bottom of her palm brushing the side of Ginny's breast, her fingers pressed against the other. “In here.”

It was Christmas Eve. Dad had discovered the charm of muggle pubs and in an action both selfish (get away from the house, from Mum, from Fred) and selfless (understanding Xenophilius had his own trauma from the war), invited Luna's father to join him down in Ottery St Catchpole. Luna was home alone. Ginny hadn't kissed her yet.

In the end, it was Luna who initiated it, lips soft and cool against Ginny's. It was everything Ginny had imagined, and yet not, all at the same time. It didn't matter – contradictions were what made their hearts continue beating, what made them human. But Ginny realised that the world had stopped tilting. It was flat on its axis, sure-footed as Ginny pressed Luna down against the solid existence of her bed, kissing her and kissing her until she was brilliantly drunk on it all. This time, her hair was the right length. She kissed in the same way Ginny had imagined, free and wild and fierce, charged with elegant inelegance.

She reached between Luna's legs, past the slope of her breasts, the long stretch of her torso, her navel, the down of her pubic hair, found tenderness and slickness, fingers searching. Luna, ever curious, mirrored her movements, pushing against Ginny's own desire. There was barely a flush on her cheeks, but the faint dusting of pink was enough for Ginny, sucking kisses against her jaw, clumsy, wanting. Even the smell of her sweat was giddily intoxicating, its perfume sticky in the crook of her neck. Ginny ran her hands along her skin, the vulnerable flesh of her inner thighs, the seeping heat of her arousal.

When Luna came, she hummed, gasp flitting upwards into volume. When Ginny came, she sighed, release, relief, Loss.

“I love you,” she said, twining her hands in Luna's hair, orange and yellow.

“I think I do too,” Luna replied, absent, and smiled.

Outside, the sun was going down, the sky streaking with colour and affection and life. Soon, Ginny would take her leave, a lingering kiss pressed upon her lips by the girl she had felt she had wanted for at least an eternity or two. Ginny would walk through the long grass and dandelions and wishes and mud, the way a girl shouldn't, at peace in the dim, the war a thing of the past, sunken with the sun.

Fred was gone. It was unavoidable. He was gone forever and the fact that he lived in her smile, in her eyes, in her hair and her freckles, was a good thing. Ginny would one day look in the mirror and stop being so afraid of Loss. It meant he had been real – he had been real and how he had laughed, how he had lived...

Luna would paint him one day, jumping from the page, colour _blazing_ in him, his fire swallowing him whole. Ginny would crumple it in her soft hands and send it off to the wind. His First Fly Since.

**Author's Note:**

> @ jk rowling: please let these characters be in pain


End file.
